


in space, no one can hear you misgender me

by scarredsodeep



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Existential Angst, F/M, Gender Issues, Oral Sex, Season/Series 01, Smut, Trans Male Character, it is the most het thing i have ever written, space is gay, this is for the prompt straddle-star gal-actica, trans apollo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 02:33:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13731294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: When you join the Colonial Fleet, they don’t issue you a gender. That means you don’t need one.





	in space, no one can hear you misgender me

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this tonight after a wonderful conversation in a comic book store about gender rebels, estro- and testo-terrestrials, and Straddle-Star Gal-actica. Enjoy!

 

When you join the Colonial Fleet, they don’t issue you a gender. That means you don’t need one.

Uniforms, barracks, showers: it doesn’t matter much what’s inside your standard-issue underwear, as long as it’s not Cylon and it’s willing to fight. That’s what they tell the nuggets, a rare recruiter’s promise they can keep: space is a post-gender frontier. Your rank matters, not your pronouns. Humanity’s very survival is at stake. No one gives fuck-all about your chromosomes.

Take Lieutenant Thrace, for example. If you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t even be able to tell Kara is a woman til she sheds her spacesuit just outside the gang shower, stripping utility away to reveal curves upon curves. You’re pretty sure that what you’re experiencing between your legs is why the girls back on Caprica didn’t want to share a bathroom with you, after you came out. Seven years on T have lowered your voice, encouraged a profusion of hair on your jawline and the fine-boned side of your hands, but they haven’t cured the gut-clenching awkwardness of the first day showering with a new crew. A crew that sees you in the same uniform as everyone else, who calls you _sir_ same as they’d address any CAG, who has no reason to think you spent months learning how to get your packer to sit right in your flight suit.

But you’ve waited as long as you reasonably can. “Get in here, Lee,” Kara calls, effortless with an unscarred chest and hips holding no contradictions. “Don’t wanna smell you tomorrow if you waste this whole water ration.”

You take a deep breath. The showers are nearly empty now—as good as it’s going to get. However people see you now is up to them. You unzip your jumpsuit, flat from your chest down to where your legs meet, and cast your standard-issue anonymity aside.

Kara barely spares you a glance. After everything, the water feels good.

*

You’re sleeping as soundly as you ever manage when someone collides with you bodily, jerking you from hazy dreams of green earth and peacetime and into cortisol-keening autonomic arousal. It’s not the worst way you’ve ever woken, but it’s not the best; you almost have the person in a headlock by the time you realize it’s Kara, drunk and laughing unprettily.

“S’not my bunk,” she whispers. You can hear her tongue move wet on her lips.

“It’s not,” you agree, your voice strangled and too-high.

Because you’ve said this, Kara says, “Then I better go.” She slides out of your bunk and bumps around the barracks til she finds her own bed.

Of all stupid moments to open your mouth.

*

You’re accompanying President Roslyn on an inspection of an agro ship and the feel of earth under your feet again makes you woozy. It sets you spinning like a dead Viper against the stars, just so much debris. If you had a network, you’d message Kara something regrettable, soil-drunk and remembering the feel of sunshine.

Thank frak for the Cylons.

*

A few weeks later, everyone almost dies, as usual. Kara puts on a pastel dress that bares her shoulders, the tops of her breasts, makes her _woman_ in the way her Colonial blues never have, and you see her like your brother did. She flirts with you all night, goes home with someone else. You get yourself off the showers, using your officer’s override to exceed water rations, and practice feeling nothing at all.

*

She corners you in the mess hall one night you’re both bleary-eyed from pulling double duty. Today was especially harrowing: saboteurs somewhere in the fleet, resource shortages impacting everyone, only a few cycles since the last sighting of a Cylon base star. Death is on your mind, and not in the usual way. You aren’t thinking about a small, personal annihilation, the only escape route you could see when you were faced with the rock-and-hard-place of your family and your transition. You aren’t thinking about Zack, the way the foreshortened loss of him opened your eyes to honesty as an option and mended the relationship between you and the General. You’re thinking about _end of the species_. You’re thinking _extinction_. You’re thinking _there isn’t a happily ever after left in the universe_.

Space is not, after all, a fairy tale. The last refuge of the gender noncompliant, a bastion of queerness in the stars, a way to earn your way in the world and pay for your medical transition—all the reasons you enlisted. All the things you were running from, running towards. Forget all that. Today space just feels like a coffin.

So there you are, wrecking your brain cells on synthetic ethanol because you have no particular reason to think anyone’s going to wake up in the morning, and there’s Kara. She sits down next to you, tugs your glass out of your hand, and knocks it back in one.

“You’ve always been annoying,” you grumble. She knocks her shoulder against yours, this ease to her inhabitation of her own body that you can only feel through other people’s skin. You signal the bartender for two more.

“Looks like we want the same thing for once,” Kara tells you. You cannot even begin with that one, so you take a long, horrible pull of your fresh drink. Engine cleaner smells better than this tastes, but then, there’s no grain alcohol left in the universe. You’ll take obliteration in whatever package it’s offered, tonight.

“Yeah? Why don’t you tell me what I want, if you know so much,” you say before you can think better of it. Your top-down control isn’t working today. Nerves and fear and so much fucking _want_ have emptied you of sense.

Kara’s light eyes gleam, because she’s never in her life backed off from a challenge. You know this. It may or may not be why you’re challenging her.

She takes a measured sip, doesn’t even grimace at the burn. She’s more practiced at this than you are—and she can beat almost everyone on the ship at Triad. You remind yourself, too late, not to bet against her. This is a woman who knows how to bluff.

“You want to get the hell off this ship. You want to eat food that’s been grown on a rock, not in a tube. You want to live to see the end of this. Sometimes, you want to be someone else’s son.”

You’re staring at the bar, unable to meet her eyes, by the time she says, “You want to get fucked up tonight. You want to get so fucked up you don’t stop yourself from coming to bed with me.”

You startle, catching her gaze in spite of yourself. She’s smirking. Heat unfurls in your gut, slow and damnably steady, spreading squirming tendrils through your tight center. You shift on your barstool, uncomfortable. “And what do you want, Lieutenant Thrace?” you’re surprised to hear yourself ask.

Kara laughs, a pure, bright sound that crashes against your maudlin mood like the tide coming in: inexorable.

You hope she washes you away.

Sure of herself in a way you can only envy, she says, “I want you to finish your drink and find out.”

*

No one tells you about space combat that you’re divorced from feedback. You pull the trigger, your missiles deploy, and you jerk in the cockpit with the discharge of momentum. But there’s no fire, no sound, no visual: there’s just your intention, streaking unseen through the universe, and your fervent, living hope it hits your target.

Sex was like that, the years you lived wrong-gendered. You were wrapped up and remote, feeling everything through cotton, through the lightless vacuum of dysphoria only guessing at sensation.

Kara touches you and it’s nothing like that. Her fingertips graze your inner thigh, leaving comet tails of burning feeling. You’re heartbeat-red, burning up from the inside, white-hot like reentry everywhere she touches. She kisses your mouth and your lips burn away, like the girl herself is solar radiation. You kiss her back, back, back. You are a black hole of wanting. You will take every bit of her in and still beg for more.

You kneel at her feet with nowhere more private to go than the weapons locker. She leans against the door, her eyes closed and her kiss-swollen mouth puffy with moan, and grins at the ceiling while you undo her thigh holster, push her sidearm aside, and finally _finally_ slide her pants down those solid, planetary hips. You bite the inside of her thigh, soft like asking permission, and she laughs, tugging her fingers through your hair like saying yes.

“ _Lee_ ,” she says, her head tipped back so when you look up all you can see is bright white teeth, flashing mouth. “Stop hesitating.”

You won’t get a better invitation than that. Your tongue still burning with whatever the two of you drank, you bury your face in her, lick her open blind, are glad to find her wet and willing to take you in. Above you she laughs, and your own knees shake on the corrugated floor, and you want to make her feel as weak as you do. You breathe deep, filling yourself with the goodness of this, this bright-gold taste on your tongue, this down-soft skin of her thighs framing your face, this moment where you are both alive and human joy has not yet gone extinct. With gratitude, with desire, you explore the interior of this woman. You are ardent, obedient, eager. You make quick work of her. You are sucking on her clit when she comes, a cry somewhere between a laugh and a shout bursting from her, her body locking up and her muscles going rigid, her pleasure filling your mouth, dripping obscene off your chin. She slides down the door before you’re quite done with her, ending up in a tangle of knees and olive drab, looking at you through slitted eyes with a smile on her face like she’s never heard of Cylons.

Because she’s Kara, first she kisses you, messy and wet, and then she goes back to teasing you. “Don’t ask me who’s the better brother,” she warns, slipping back into her easy skin like she didn’t just come apart all over you. “Jealousy won’t flatter you, flyboy.”

“Forty-seven thousand left in the human race and I pick you,” you mutter, trying to make it sound like you’re complaining. She tips her forehead towards you, knocks it softly against yours. On the cold metal floor, her hand finds yours. The fingers interlace. She speaks casual but squeezes serious.

“My ass is cold,” she tells you, punctuating the sentiment with a kiss to your temple. “Next time, fuck me someplace with bedsheets.”

“‘Next time?’ Starbuck, haven’t they told you we’ll all be dead by morning?”

Her eyes flick open slow, taking on a rarely seen gold in this particular light. She lays one finger over your lips, uncharacteristically gentle. “Now that I know you can do _that_ , Apollo? You’ve got the best pilot in the fleet keeping you alive.”

You press your face into her shoulder and hide your smile against her skin.

For tonight, it’s enough.

 


End file.
